Microsoft's Minecraft-Themed AI Tool, 'Malmo', Now Open Source

With a little programming know-how, you can help teach AI bots how to comprehend Minecraft players and interact with a digital world. You might be a pretty savvy Minecraft player, but are you as good at playing Minecraft as a computer? It sounds like a silly question to ask—who really cares about AI Minecraft skills, anyway—but you’d be surprised by the answer. As it turns out, Minecraft represents an ideal environment for artificial intelligence research, and it’s the big training ground for Microsoft’s Project Malmo platform. And, as Microsoft announced today, Project Malmo is now open source and free for anyone to play with. “The system, which had until now only been open to a small group of computer scientists in private preview, is primarily designed to help researchers develop…